I have only just started to read The Frock Coated Communist, Tristram Hunt’s biography of Engels, but this (written while he was still a very young man in Germany) is worth quoting:
“… the mass of the working population fell victim to drink. From nine in the evening, in great crowds & arm in arm, taking up the whole width of the street, the “soused men” tottered their way, bawling discordantly, from one inn to the other & finally back home.”
Sir Liam Donaldson seems keen to blame our binge drinking culture on middle class parents who give their small children watered down wine to drink; Engels was blaming cruel capitalists & the loss of jobs in weaving & textiles because of competition from industrial Manchester with its global connections.
